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  • CHAPTER XV

  • "By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering."

  • Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our

  • experience to us then?

  • Tess Durbeyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind.

  • At last she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

  • If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under the guidance of

  • sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no doubt

  • she would never have been imposed on.

  • But it had not been in Tess's power--nor is it in anybody's power--to feel the whole

  • truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.

  • She--and how many more--might have ironically said to God with Saint

  • Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast permitted."

  • She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking fowls, or

  • cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and brothers out of

  • some finery which d'Urberville had given her, and she had put by with contempt.

  • Apply to him she would not.

  • But she would often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to

  • be working hard.

  • She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year;

  • the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of The

  • Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth

  • and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in

  • which she had taken some share.

  • She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that

  • there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her

  • own death, when all these charms would have

  • disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year,

  • giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely

  • there.

  • When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each

  • yearly encounter with such a cold relation?

  • She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future those who had known her

  • would say: "It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and there

  • would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement.

  • Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know

  • the place in month, week, season or year.

  • Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

  • Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into

  • her voice.

  • Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent.

  • She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and

  • arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the last year

  • or two had quite failed to demoralize.

  • But for the world's opinion those experiences would have been simply a

  • liberal education.

  • She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known, was nearly

  • forgotten in Marlott.

  • But it became evident to her that she could never be really comfortable again in a

  • place which had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"--and,

  • through her, even closer union--with the rich d'Urbervilles.

  • At least she could not be comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her

  • keen consciousness of it.

  • Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be

  • happy in some nook which had no memories.

  • To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do

  • that she would have to get away. Was once lost always lost really true of

  • chastity? she would ask herself.

  • She might prove it false if she could veil bygones.

  • The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to

  • maidenhood alone.

  • She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.

  • A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible

  • in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to

  • go.

  • At last, one day in early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of her

  • mother's, to whom she had addressed inquiries long before--a person whom she

  • had never seen--that a skilful milkmaid was

  • required at a dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the dairyman would be

  • glad to have her for the summer months.

  • It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably far

  • enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small.

  • To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties,

  • counties as provinces and kingdoms.

  • On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville air-castles in the

  • dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and

  • nothing more.

  • Her mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so well, though no words had passed

  • between them on the subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

  • Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new place to her was

  • the accidental virtues of its lying near her forefathers' country (for they were not

  • Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone).

  • The dairy called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of

  • the former estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her

  • granddames and their powerful husbands.

  • She would be able to look at them, and think not only that d'Urberville, like

  • Babylon, had fallen, but that the individual innocence of a humble descendant

  • could lapse as silently.

  • All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her

  • ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the

  • twigs.

  • It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing

  • with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

  • END OF PHASE THE SECOND

  • >

  • CHAPTER XVI

  • On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three years after

  • the return from Trantridge--silent, reconstructive years for Tess Durbeyfield--

  • she left her home for the second time.

  • Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she started in

  • a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through which it was necessary

  • to pass on her journey, now in a direction

  • almost opposite to that of her first adventuring.

  • On the curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her

  • father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

  • Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as heretofore,

  • with no great diminution of pleasure in their consciousness, although she would be

  • far off, and they deprived of her smile.

  • In a few days the children would engage in their games as merrily as ever, without the

  • sense of any gap left by her departure.

  • This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the best; were she to

  • remain they would probably gain less good by her precepts than harm by her example.

  • She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction of

  • highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the south-west; for the

  • railways which engirdled this interior

  • tract of country had never yet struck across it.

  • While waiting, however, there came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving

  • approximately in the direction that she wished to pursue.

  • Though he was a stranger to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him,

  • ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance.

  • He was going to Weatherbury, and by accompanying him thither she could walk the

  • remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of

  • Casterbridge.

  • Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than to make a

  • slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the farmer recommended

  • her.

  • Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of heath dividing

  • this district from the low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood

  • that was the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.

  • Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she felt akin to the

  • landscape.

  • Not so very far to the left of her she could discern a dark patch in the scenery,

  • which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere-

  • -in the church of which parish the bones of

  • her ancestors--her useless ancestors--lay entombed.

  • She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance they had

  • led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and

  • spoon.

  • "Pooh--I have as much of mother as father in me!" she said.

  • "All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid."

  • The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when she reached

  • them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated, the distance being

  • actually but a few miles.

  • It was two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit

  • commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in

  • which milk and butter grew to rankness, and

  • were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home--the verdant

  • plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.

  • It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies, Blackmoor Vale,

  • which, save during her disastrous sojourn at Trantridge, she had exclusively known

  • till now.

  • The world was drawn to a larger pattern here.

  • The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended,

  • the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families.

  • These myriads of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west

  • outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before.

  • The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert

  • with burghers.

  • The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight, which the

  • white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant

  • elevation on which she stood.

  • The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as

  • that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering.

  • It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and

  • scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.

  • The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed

  • not like the streams in Blackmoor.

  • Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the

  • incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares.

  • The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist,

  • rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day

  • long.

  • There the water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

  • Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense of being

  • amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her

  • spirits wonderfully.

  • Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as

  • she bounded along against the soft south wind.

  • She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a

  • joy.

  • Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually fluctuating

  • between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave.

  • One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and tragical.

  • When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded

  • with her less elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.

  • It was her best face physically that was now set against the south wind.

  • The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere,

  • which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at length mastered

  • Tess.

  • Being even now only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally

  • had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an

  • impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.

  • And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher and higher.

  • She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter

  • that her eyes had so often wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of

  • the tree of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ...

  • O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ...

  • Beasts and Cattle ...

  • Children of Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"

  • She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as

  • yet."

  • And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance in a

  • Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of

  • outdoor Nature retain in their souls far

  • more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized

  • religion taught their race at later date.

  • However, Tess found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old

  • Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough.

  • Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that of having

  • started towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield

  • temperament.

  • Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did nothing of the kind; but she

  • resembled him in being content with immediate and small achievements, and in

  • having no mind for laborious effort towards

  • such petty social advancement as could alone be effected by a family so heavily

  • handicapped as the once powerful d'Urbervilles were now.

  • There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended family, as well as

  • the natural energy of Tess's years, rekindled after the experience which had so

  • overwhelmed her for the time.

  • Let the truth be told--women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain

  • their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.

  • While there's life there's hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the

  • "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

  • Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life, descended the Egdon

  • slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her pilgrimage.

  • The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival vales now

  • showed itself.

  • The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from the heights around; to read aright the

  • valley before her it was necessary to descend into its midst.

  • When Tess had accomplished this feat she found herself to be standing on a carpeted

  • level, which stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could reach.

  • The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to the vale all

  • this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and attenuated, lay serpentining

  • along through the midst of its former spoils.

  • Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant

  • flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more

  • consequence to the surroundings than that fly.

  • The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the

  • mind of a solitary heron, which, after descending to the ground not far from her

  • path, stood with neck erect, looking at her.

  • Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and repeated call--

  • "Waow! waow! waow!"

  • From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by contagion,

  • accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog.

  • It was not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess had

  • arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time--half-past four o'clock, when

  • the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

  • The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically waiting for

  • the call, now trooped towards the steading in the background, their great bags of milk

  • swinging under them as they walked.

  • Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by the open gate through

  • which they had entered before her.

  • Long thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with

  • vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy

  • smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows

  • and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its

  • profundity.

  • Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present

  • moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of

  • which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while

  • the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately

  • inwards upon the wall.

  • Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much

  • care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace

  • wall; copied them as diligently as it had

  • copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago, or the outline of Alexander,

  • Caesar, and the Pharaohs. They were the less restful cows that were

  • stalled.

  • Those that would stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,

  • where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now--all prime milchers, such

  • as were seldom seen out of this valley, and

  • not always within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads

  • supplied at this prime season of the year.

  • Those of them that were spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling

  • brilliancy, and the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something of

  • military display.

  • Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like the

  • legs of a gipsy's crock; and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk

  • oozed forth and fell in drops to the ground.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XVII

  • The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of the dairy-

  • house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids walking in pattens, not on

  • account of the weather, but to keep their shoes above the mulch of the barton.

  • Each girl sat down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek

  • resting against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess

  • as she approached.

  • The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and

  • gazing on the ground, did not observe her.

  • One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man-- whose long white "pinner" was somewhat

  • finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose jacket underneath had a

  • presentable marketing aspect--the master-

  • dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a working milker and

  • butter maker here during six days, and on the seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth

  • in his family pew at church, being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:

  • Dairyman Dick All the week:-- On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.

  • Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

  • The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it happened

  • that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand-- for the days were busy ones now--and he

  • received her warmly; inquiring for her

  • mother and the rest of the family--(though this as a matter of form merely, for in

  • reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence till apprised of

  • the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).

  • "Oh--ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very well," he said terminatively.

  • "Though I've never been there since.

  • And a aged woman of ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago,

  • told me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came originally

  • from these parts, and that 'twere a old

  • ancient race that had all but perished off the earth--though the new generations

  • didn't know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old

  • woman's ramblings, not I."

  • "Oh no--it is nothing," said Tess. Then the talk was of business only.

  • "You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows going azew at this

  • time o' year."

  • She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down.

  • She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown delicate.

  • "Quite sure you can stand it?

  • 'Tis comfortable enough here for rough folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber

  • frame."

  • She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness seemed to win him

  • over. "Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay,

  • or victuals of some sort, hey?

  • Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it.

  • But faith, if 'twas I, I should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."

  • "I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

  • She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the surprise--indeed,

  • slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it had apparently never occurred

  • that milk was good as a beverage.

  • "Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while holding up the

  • pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't touched for years--not

  • I.

  • Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead.

  • You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to the nearest cow.

  • "Not but what she do milk rather hard.

  • We've hard ones and we've easy ones, like other folks.

  • However, you'll find out that soon enough."

  • When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her stool under the

  • cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to feel

  • that she really had laid a new foundation for her future.

  • The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she was able to look about her.

  • The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men operating on the

  • hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier natures.

  • It was a large dairy.

  • There were nearly a hundred milchers under Crick's management, all told; and of the

  • herd the master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from

  • home.

  • These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being more or

  • less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest,

  • from indifference, they should not milk

  • them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should fail in the same way for lack of

  • finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the cows would "go azew"--that is,

  • dry up.

  • It was not the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that

  • with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately cessation, of

  • supply.

  • After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in the barton,

  • and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails,

  • except a momentary exclamation to one or

  • other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still.

  • The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and down, and the swing

  • of the cows' tails.

  • Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either

  • slope of the valley--a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long

  • forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in

  • character very greatly from the landscape they composed now.

  • "To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished

  • off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and

  • moving on to the next hard-yielder in his

  • vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie down their milk to-day as usual.

  • Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going

  • under by midsummer."

  • "'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.

  • "I've noticed such things afore." "To be sure.

  • It may be so.

  • I didn't think o't." "I've been told that it goes up into their

  • horns at such times," said a dairymaid.

  • "Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though

  • even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, "I couldn't say;

  • I certainly could not.

  • But as nott cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite agree to

  • it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows,

  • Jonathan?

  • Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?"

  • "I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

  • "Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.

  • "Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day.

  • Folks, we must lift up a stave or two-- that's the only cure for't."

  • Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when

  • they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at

  • this request burst into melody--in purely

  • business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according

  • to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance.

  • When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad aboutb a

  • murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone

  • flames around him, one of the male milkers said--

  • "I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!

  • You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."

  • Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to the dairyman,

  • but she was wrong.

  • A reply, in the shape of "Why?" came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the

  • stalls; it had been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not

  • hitherto perceived.

  • "Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the dairyman.

  • "Though I do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows--at least that's

  • my experience.

  • Once there was an old aged man over at Mellstock--William Dewy by name--one of the

  • family that used to do a good deal of business as tranters over there--Jonathan,

  • do ye mind?--I knowed the man by sight as

  • well as I know my own brother, in a manner of speaking.

  • Well, this man was a coming home along from a wedding, where he had been playing his

  • fiddle, one fine moonlight night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut across Forty-

  • acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass.

  • The bull seed William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though William

  • runned his best, and hadn't MUCH drink in him (considering 'twas a wedding, and the

  • folks well off), he found he'd never reach

  • the fence and get over in time to save himself.

  • Well, as a last thought, he pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig,

  • turning to the bull, and backing towards the corner.

  • The bull softened down, and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who fiddled

  • on and on; till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face.

  • But no sooner did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge than the bull

  • would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the seat of William's breeches.

  • Well, William had to turn about and play on, willy-nilly; and 'twas only three

  • o'clock in the world, and 'a knowed that nobody would come that way for hours, and

  • he so leery and tired that 'a didn't know what to do.

  • When he had scraped till about four o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give

  • over soon, and he said to himself, 'There's only this last tune between me and eternal

  • welfare!

  • Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.' Well, then he called to mind how he'd seen

  • the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o' night.

  • It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to play a trick upon the

  • bull.

  • So he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and

  • behold, down went the bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere

  • the true 'Tivity night and hour.

  • As soon as his horned friend were down, William turned, clinked off like a long-

  • dog, and jumped safe over hedge, before the praying bull had got on his feet again to

  • take after him.

  • William used to say that he'd seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never

  • such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had been played

  • upon, and 'twas not Christmas Eve....

  • Yes, William Dewy, that was the man's name; and I can tell you to a foot where's he a-

  • lying in Mellstock Churchyard at this very moment--just between the second yew-tree

  • and the north aisle."

  • "It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when faith was a living

  • thing!"

  • The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice behind the dun cow;

  • but as nobody understood the reference, no notice was taken, except that the narrator

  • seemed to think it might imply scepticism as to his tale.

  • "Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well."

  • "Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind the dun cow.

  • Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's interlocutor, of whom she could

  • see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his head so persistently in the

  • flank of the milcher.

  • She could not understand why he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman

  • himself.

  • But no explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long enough to have

  • milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as if he could

  • not get on.

  • "Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman.

  • "'Tis knack, not strength, that does it." "So I find," said the other, standing up at

  • last and stretching his arms.

  • "I think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers ache."

  • Tess could then see him at full length.

  • He wore the ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when

  • milking, and his boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his

  • local livery.

  • Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing.

  • But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the discovery

  • that he was one whom she had seen before.

  • Such vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could

  • not remember where she had met him; and then it flashed upon her that he was the

  • pedestrian who had joined in the club-dance

  • at Marlott--the passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with

  • others but not with her, and slightingly left her, and gone on his way with his

  • friends.

  • The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident anterior to her

  • troubles produced a momentary dismay lest, recognizing her also, he should by some

  • means discover her story.

  • But it passed away when she found no sign of remembrance in him.

  • She saw by degrees that since their first and only encounter his mobile face had

  • grown more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's shapely moustache and beard--

  • the latter of the palest straw colour where

  • it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther from its root.

  • Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and

  • gaiters, and a starched white shirt.

  • Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what he was.

  • He might with equal probability have been an eccentric landowner or a gentlemanly

  • ploughman.

  • That he was but a novice at dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he

  • had spent upon the milking of one cow.

  • Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the newcomer, "How pretty

  • she is!" with something of real generosity and admiration, though with a half hope

  • that the auditors would qualify the

  • assertion--which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness being an

  • inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess.

  • When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where Mrs

  • Crick, the dairyman's wife--who was too respectable to go out milking herself, and

  • wore a hot stuff gown in warm weather

  • because the dairymaids wore prints--was giving an eye to the leads and things.

  • Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house besides

  • herself, most of the helpers going to their homes.

  • She saw nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on the

  • story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the evening being occupied

  • in arranging her place in the bed-chamber.

  • It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the sleeping-cots of

  • the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same apartment.

  • They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather older than herself.

  • By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell asleep immediately.

  • But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wakeful than Tess,

  • and would insist upon relating to the latter various particulars of the homestead

  • into which she had just entered.

  • The girl's whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy mind, they

  • seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they floated.

  • "Mr Angel Clare--he that is learning milking, and that plays the harp--never

  • says much to us. He is a pa'son's son, and is too much taken

  • up wi' his own thoughts to notice girls.

  • He is the dairyman's pupil--learning farming in all its branches.

  • He has learnt sheep-farming at another place, and he's now mastering dairy-

  • work....

  • Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born. His father is the Reverent Mr Clare at

  • Emminster--a good many miles from here." "Oh--I have heard of him," said her

  • companion, now awake.

  • "A very earnest clergyman, is he not?" "Yes--that he is--the earnestest man in all

  • Wessex, they say--the last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me--for all about

  • here be what they call High.

  • All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa'sons too."

  • Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr Clare was not made a

  • parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep again, the words of her

  • informant coming to her along with the

  • smell of the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured dripping of

  • the whey from the wrings downstairs.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XVIII

  • Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an

  • appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth

  • somewhat too small and delicately lined for

  • a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and then; enough

  • to do away with any inference of indecision.

  • Nevertheless, something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and

  • regard, marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern about his

  • material future.

  • Yet as a lad people had said of him that he was one who might do anything if he tried.

  • He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end of the county,

  • and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months' pupil, after going the round of

  • some other farms, his object being to

  • acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a view either to

  • the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as circumstances might decide.

  • His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step in

  • the young man's career which had been anticipated neither by himself nor by

  • others.

  • Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter, married a

  • second late in life.

  • This lady had somewhat unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the

  • youngest, and his father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation.

  • Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only son who

  • had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one of them whose early

  • promise might have done full justice to an academical training.

  • Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott dance, on a day

  • when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home, a parcel came to the

  • Vicarage from the local bookseller's, directed to the Reverend James Clare.

  • The Vicar having opened it and found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon

  • he jumped up from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under

  • his arm.

  • "Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked peremptorily, holding up the volume.

  • "It was ordered, sir." "Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I

  • am happy to say."

  • The shopkeeper looked into his order-book. "Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he

  • said. "It was ordered by Mr Angel Clare, and

  • should have been sent to him."

  • Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and dejected, and called

  • Angel into his study. "Look into this book, my boy," he said.

  • "What do you know about it?"

  • "I ordered it," said Angel simply. "What for?"

  • "To read." "How can you think of reading it?"

  • "How can I?

  • Why--it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral, or even religious,

  • work published." "Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that.

  • But religious!--and for YOU, who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"

  • "Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the son, with anxious thought

  • upon his face, "I should like to say, once for all, that I should prefer not to take

  • Orders.

  • I fear I could not conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent.

  • I shall always have the warmest affection for her.

  • There is no institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot

  • honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to liberate

  • her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry."

  • It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar

  • that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this!

  • He was stultified, shocked, paralysed.

  • And if Angel were not going to enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to

  • Cambridge?

  • The University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of fixed

  • ideas, a preface without a volume.

  • He was a man not merely religious, but devout; a firm believer--not as the phrase

  • is now elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and out of

  • it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school: one who could

  • Indeed opine That the Eternal and Divine

  • Did, eighteen centuries ago In very truth...

  • Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

  • "No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest), taking it 'in

  • the literal and grammatical sense' as required by the Declaration; and,

  • therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state of affairs," said Angel.

  • "My whole instinct in matters of religion is towards reconstruction; to quote your

  • favorite Epistle to the Hebrews, 'the removing of those things that are shaken,

  • as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'"

  • His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

  • "What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting ourselves to give

  • you a University education, if it is not to be used for the honour and glory of God?"

  • his father repeated.

  • "Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father."

  • Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like his brothers.

  • But the Vicar's view of that seat of learning as a stepping-stone to Orders

  • alone was quite a family tradition; and so rooted was the idea in his mind that

  • perseverance began to appear to the

  • sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and wrong the pious

  • heads of the household, who had been and were, as his father had hinted, compelled

  • to exercise much thrift to carry out this

  • uniform plan of education for the three young men.

  • "I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last.

  • "I feel that I have no right to go there in the circumstances."

  • The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing themselves.

  • He spent years and years in desultory studies, undertakings, and meditations; he

  • began to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances.

  • The material distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised.

  • Even the "good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy)

  • had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives.

  • As a balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see what the

  • world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or business there,

  • he was carried off his head, and nearly

  • entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not

  • greatly the worse for the experience.

  • Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an unconquerable, and

  • almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life, and shut him out from such

  • success as he might have aspired to by

  • following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual one.

  • But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years; and having an

  • acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to

  • Angel that this might be a lead in the right direction.

  • Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at home--farming, at any rate, after

  • becoming well qualified for the business by a careful apprenticeship--that was a

  • vocation which would probably afford an

  • independence without the sacrifice of what he valued even more than a competency--

  • intellectual liberty.

  • So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a student of kine,

  • and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he could get a comfortable

  • lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

  • His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the dairy-house.

  • It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft, and had been closed up for

  • a long time till he arrived and selected it as his retreat.

  • Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up

  • and down when the household had gone to rest.

  • A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind which was his bed, the

  • outer part being furnished as a homely sitting-room.

  • At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming upon an

  • old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter humour that he

  • might have to get his living by it in the streets some day.

  • But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals downstairs in the

  • general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his wife, and the maids and men, who

  • all together formed a lively assembly; for

  • though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the family at meals.

  • The longer Clare resided here the less objection had he to his company, and the

  • more did he like to share quarters with them in common.

  • Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their companionship.

  • The conventional farm-folk of his imagination-- personified in the newspaper-

  • press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge- -were obliterated after a few days'

  • residence.

  • At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare's

  • intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with whom he now

  • hobnobbed seemed a little strange.

  • Sitting down as a level member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset

  • an undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings,

  • appeared retrogressive and unmeaning.

  • But with living on there, day after day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a

  • new aspect in the spectacle.

  • Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of

  • monotonousness.

  • His host and his host's household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately

  • known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.

  • The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on

  • trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de

  • difference entre les hommes."

  • The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist.

  • He had been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures--beings of many

  • minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one

  • here and there bright even to genius, some

  • stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially

  • Cromwellian--into men who had private views of each other, as he had of his friends;

  • who could applaud or condemn each other,

  • amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or

  • vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the road to dusty death.

  • Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and for what it

  • brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.

  • Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic

  • melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief

  • in a beneficent Power.

  • For the first time of late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without

  • any eye to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed

  • it desirable to master occupied him but little time.

  • He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity.

  • Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known

  • but darkly--the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds

  • in their different tempers, trees, waters

  • and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

  • The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire acceptable in the

  • large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs Crick's orders, who held that he was

  • too genteel to mess at their table, it was

  • Angel Clare's custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-

  • and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged flap at his elbow.

  • The light from the long, wide, mullioned window opposite shone in upon his nook,

  • and, assisted by a secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the chimney,

  • enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so.

  • Between Clare and the window was the table at which his companions sat, their munching

  • profiles rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house door,

  • through which were visible the rectangular

  • leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk.

  • At the further end the great churn could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping

  • heard--the moving power being discernible through the window in the form of a

  • spiritless horse walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

  • For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly reading from

  • some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by post, hardly noticed that she

  • was present at table.

  • She talked so little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

  • strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of neglecting the

  • particulars of an outward scene for the general impression.

  • One day, however, when he had been conning one of his music-scores, and by force of

  • imagination was hearing the tune in his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the

  • music-sheet rolled to the hearth.

  • He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting on the top in a dying

  • dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward

  • tune; also at the two chimney crooks

  • dangling down from the cotterel, or cross- bar, plumed with soot, which quivered to

  • the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an accompaniment.

  • The conversation at the table mixed in with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought:

  • "What a fluty voice one of those milkmaids has!

  • I suppose it is the new one."

  • Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

  • She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his

  • presence in the room was almost forgotten.

  • "I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our souls can

  • be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

  • The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with serious

  • inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted

  • erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows.

  • "What--really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.

  • "A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the grass at night and

  • look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will

  • soon find that you are hundreds and

  • hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all."

  • The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

  • "Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey?

  • To think o' the miles I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year,

  • courting, or trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least notion

  • o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch above my shirt-collar."

  • The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the dairyman's pupil,

  • Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

  • Clare continued to observe her.

  • She soon finished her eating, and having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her,

  • began to trace imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

  • constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

  • "What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he said to

  • himself.

  • And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar, something

  • which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past, before the necessity of

  • taking thought had made the heavens gray.

  • He concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell.

  • A casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was

  • not greatly curious about it.

  • But the circumstance was sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the

  • other pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XIX

  • In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without fancy or

  • choice.

  • But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular pair of hands, sometimes

  • carrying this predilection so far as to refuse to stand at all except to their

  • favourite, the pail of a stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.

  • It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these partialities and

  • aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in the event of a milkman or

  • maid going away from the dairy, he was placed in a difficulty.

  • The maids' private aims, however, were the reverse of the dairyman's rule, the daily

  • selection by each damsel of the eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed

  • rendering the operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

  • Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a preference for her

  • style of manipulation, and her fingers having become delicate from the long

  • domiciliary imprisonments to which she had

  • subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she would have

  • been glad to meet the milchers' views in this respect.

  • Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular--Dumpling, Fancy,

  • Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud--who, though the teats of

  • one or two were as hard as carrots, gave

  • down to her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the fingers.

  • Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to take the

  • animals just as they came, expecting the very hard yielders which she could not yet

  • manage.

  • But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly chance position of

  • the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she felt that their order could not be

  • the result of accident.

  • The dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late, and at

  • the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she rested against the cow, full

  • of sly inquiry upon him.

  • "Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in making the

  • accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in spite of her, so as

  • to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip remaining severely still.

  • "Well, it makes no difference," said he. "You will always be here to milk them."

  • "Do you think so?

  • I HOPE I shall! But I don't KNOW."

  • She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her grave

  • reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her meaning.

  • She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were somehow a factor in her

  • wish.

  • Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when the milking was over, she walked in the

  • garden alone, to continue her regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of

  • his considerateness.

  • It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such delicate

  • equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two

  • or three senses, if not five.

  • There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to

  • everything within the horizon.

  • The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere

  • negation of noise. It was broken by the strumming of strings.

  • Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head.

  • Dim, flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her

  • as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity.

  • To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were poor; but the relative is

  • all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot.

  • Far from leaving she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he

  • might not guess her presence.

  • The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated

  • for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of

  • pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming

  • weeds emitting offensive smells--weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed

  • a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers.

  • She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-

  • spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with

  • thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing

  • off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree

  • trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still

  • unobserved of him.

  • Tess was conscious of neither time nor space.

  • The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a

  • star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of

  • the second-hand harp, and their harmonies

  • passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes.

  • The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the

  • garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility.

  • Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not

  • close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

  • The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the western

  • bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by accident, dusk having closed

  • in elsewhere.

  • He concluded his plaintive melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great

  • skill; and she waited, thinking another might be begun.

  • But, tired of playing, he had desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up

  • behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away

  • furtively, as if hardly moving at all.

  • Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones reaching her,

  • though he was some distance off. "What makes you draw off in that way,

  • Tess?" said he.

  • "Are you afraid?" "Oh no, sir--not of outdoor things;

  • especially just now when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."

  • "But you have your indoor fears--eh?"

  • "Well--yes, sir." "What of?"

  • "I couldn't quite say." "The milk turning sour?"

  • "No."

  • "Life in general?" "Yes, sir."

  • "Ah--so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather

  • serious, don't you think so?"

  • "It is--now you put it that way." "All the same, I shouldn't have expected a

  • young girl like you to see it so just yet. How is it you do?"

  • She maintained a hesitating silence.

  • "Come, Tess, tell me in confidence." She thought that he meant what were the

  • aspects of things to her, and replied shyly--

  • "The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as if they had.

  • And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?'

  • And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the

  • biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther

  • away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming!

  • Beware of me! Beware of me!'...

  • But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies

  • away!"

  • He was surprised to find this young woman-- who though but a milkmaid had just that

  • touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of her housemates--shaping

  • such sad imaginings.

  • She was expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth

  • Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those of the age--

  • the ache of modernism.

  • The perception arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced

  • ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more

  • accurate expression, by words in logy and

  • ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

  • Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young; more than

  • strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.

  • Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to

  • intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been

  • her mental harvest.

  • Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and good

  • education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive.

  • For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason.

  • But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the Valley of

  • Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz-- as she herself had felt two or three years

  • ago--"My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life.

  • I loathe it; I would not live alway." It was true that he was at present out of

  • his class.

  • But she knew that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard, he

  • was studying what he wanted to know.

  • He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning

  • to be a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of

  • cattle.

  • He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a monarch his

  • flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his

  • maids.

  • At times, nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly

  • bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer,

  • and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.

  • Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively

  • puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and

  • mood without attempting to pry into each other's history.

  • Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to

  • her one more of his.

  • Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her

  • own vitality. At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare

  • as an intelligence rather than as a man.

  • As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of the abundance of his

  • illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental standpoint and the

  • unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she

  • became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part

  • whatever.

  • He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned something to her

  • about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was gathering the buds called "lords

  • and ladies" from the bank while he spoke.

  • "Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.

  • "Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of sadness,

  • fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile.

  • "Just a sense of what might have been with me!

  • My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances!

  • When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a

  • nothing I am! I'm like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived

  • in the Bible.

  • There is no more spirit in me." "Bless my soul, don't go troubling about

  • that!

  • Why," he said with some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to

  • help you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to

  • take up--"

  • "It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had peeled.

  • "What?" "I meant that there are always more ladies

  • than lords when you come to peel them."

  • "Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any course of

  • study--history, for example?"

  • "Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I know

  • already." "Why not?"

  • "Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only--finding out that

  • there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only

  • act her part; making me sad, that's all.

  • The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just

  • like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like

  • thousands's and thousands'."

  • "What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"

  • "I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike,"

  • she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.

  • "But that's what books will not tell me."

  • "Tess, fie for such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with a conventional

  • sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to himself

  • in bygone days.

  • And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter

  • of the soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote.

  • She went on peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the

  • wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft

  • cheek, lingeringly went away.

  • When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and

  • then, awakening from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility

  • impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition

  • of displeasure with herself for her niaiserie, and with a quickening warmth in

  • her heart of hearts. How stupid he must think her!

  • In an access of hunger for his good opinion she bethought herself of what she had

  • latterly endeavoured to forget, so unpleasant had been its issues--the

  • identity of her family with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles.

  • Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her,

  • perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her

  • sufficiently to forget her childish conduct

  • with the lords and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people

  • in Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no

  • spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money

  • and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.

  • But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly sounded

  • the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking the former if Mr Clare

  • had any great respect for old county

  • families when they had lost all their money and land.

  • "Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the most rebellest rozums you

  • ever knowed--not a bit like the rest of his family; and if there's one thing that he do

  • hate more than another 'tis the notion of what's called a' old family.

  • He says that it stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in

  • past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now.

  • There's the Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and the

  • Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could

  • buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most.

  • Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paridelles--the old

  • family that used to own lots o' the lands out by King's Hintock, now owned by the

  • Earl o' Wessex, afore even he or his was heard of.

  • Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl for days.

  • 'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll never make a good dairymaid!

  • All your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a

  • thousand years to git strength for more deeds!'

  • A boy came here t'other day asking for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when

  • we asked him his surname he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when we

  • asked why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long enough.

  • 'Ah! you're the very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi'en;

  • 'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him half-a-crown.

  • O no! he can't stomach old families!"

  • After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad that she had not

  • said a word in a weak moment about her family--even though it was so unusually old

  • almost to have gone round the circle and become a new one.

  • Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that respect.

  • She held her tongue about the d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose

  • name she bore.

  • The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her that it was largely owing

  • to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XX

  • The season developed and matured.

  • Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches,

  • and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had

  • stood in their place when these were

  • nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

  • Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted

  • up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and

  • breathings.

  • Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even

  • merrily.

  • Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being

  • above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances

  • begin to cramp natural feelings, and the

  • stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

  • Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing

  • aimed at out of doors.

  • Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a

  • passion, yet apparently keeping out of it.

  • All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two

  • streams in one vale.

  • Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would

  • be so happy again.

  • She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new

  • surroundings.

  • The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing

  • had been transplanted to a deeper soil.

  • Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection

  • and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,

  • awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me?

  • What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"

  • Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy, warming

  • apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his

  • consciousness.

  • So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no

  • more than a philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting

  • specimen of womankind.

  • They met continually; they could not help it.

  • They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in

  • the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early,

  • here.

  • Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a

  • little past three.

  • It usually fell to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first

  • being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon

  • discovered that she could be depended upon

  • not to sleep though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently

  • upon her.

  • No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room and ran to

  • the dairyman's door; then up the ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper;

  • then woke her fellow-milkmaids.

  • By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air.

  • The remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the

  • pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

  • The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day's close, though

  • the degree of their shade may be the same.

  • In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight

  • of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is

  • the drowsy reverse.

  • Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons to get up at

  • the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world.

  • In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at

  • once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her.

  • The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead

  • impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve.

  • At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified

  • largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because

  • he knew that at that preternatural time

  • hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open

  • air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England.

  • Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns.

  • She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

  • The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the

  • spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection hour.

  • He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side.

  • Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion's face, which was the

  • focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of

  • phosphorescence upon it.

  • She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large.

  • In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day

  • from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of it, wore the same

  • aspect to her.

  • It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply.

  • She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman--a whole sex

  • condensed into one typical form.

  • He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she

  • did not like because she did not understand them.

  • "Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

  • Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply feminine; they

  • had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being who

  • craved it.

  • At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.

  • Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the

  • boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead; or, if

  • already on the spot, hardily maintained

  • their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their

  • heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets

  • by clockwork.

  • They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and apparently no

  • thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small

  • extent.

  • On the gray moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through the

  • night--dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general

  • sea of dew.

  • From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to

  • feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they found her; the snoring puff from

  • her nostrils, when she recognized them,

  • making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.

  • Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk them on the

  • spot, as the case might require.

  • Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a white sea, out

  • of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.

  • Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the wing sunning

  • themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the mead, which now shone like

  • glass rods.

  • Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops

  • upon her hair, like seed pearls.

  • When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover,

  • Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes

  • scintillated in the sunbeams and she was

  • again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other

  • women of the world.

  • About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the non-resident

  • milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old Deborah Fyander for not

  • washing her hands.

  • "For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!

  • Upon my soul, if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways,

  • they'd swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and that's

  • saying a good deal."

  • The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common with the

  • rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from the wall in the kitchen by

  • Mrs Crick, this being the invariable

  • preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its return journey when

  • the table had been cleared.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XXI

  • There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast.

  • The churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come.

  • Whenever this happened the dairy was paralyzed.

  • Squish, squash echoed the milk in the great cylinder, but never arose the sound they

  • waited for.

  • Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle, Izz Huett, and

  • the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the

  • rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the churn;

  • and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on moon-like eyes to show his

  • sense of the situation.

  • Even the melancholy horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair

  • at each walk round.

  • "'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in Egdon--years!" said the

  • dairyman bitterly. "And he was nothing to what his father had

  • been.

  • I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I DON'T believe in en; though 'a

  • do cast folks' waters very true. But I shall have to go to 'n if he's alive.

  • O yes, I shall have to go to 'n, if this sort of thing continnys!"

  • Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's desperation.

  • "Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call 'Wide-

  • O', was a very good man when I was a boy," said Jonathan Kail.

  • "But he's rotten as touchwood by now."

  • "My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and a clever

  • man a' were, so I've heard grandf'er say," continued Mr Crick.

  • "But there's no such genuine folk about nowadays!"

  • Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

  • "Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said tentatively.

  • "I've heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it.

  • Why, Crick--that maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn't come

  • then--" "Ah yes, yes!--but that isn't the rights

  • o't.

  • It had nothing to do with the love-making. I can mind all about it--'twas the damage

  • to the churn." He turned to Clare.

  • "Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one time, sir,

  • courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her as he had deceived many

  • afore.

  • But he had another sort o' woman to reckon wi' this time, and it was not the girl

  • herself.

  • One Holy Thursday of all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now,

  • only there was no churning in hand, when we zid the girl's mother coming up to the

  • door, wi' a great brass-mounted umbrella in

  • her hand that would ha' felled an ox, and saying 'Do Jack Dollop work here?--because

  • I want him! I have a big bone to pick with he, I can

  • assure 'n!'

  • And some way behind her mother walked Jack's young woman, crying bitterly into

  • her handkercher. 'O Lard, here's a time!' said Jack, looking

  • out o' winder at 'em.

  • 'She'll murder me! Where shall I get--where shall I--?

  • Don't tell her where I be!'

  • And with that he scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and shut himself

  • inside, just as the young woman's mother busted into the milk-house.

  • 'The villain--where is he?' says she.

  • 'I'll claw his face for'n, let me only catch him!'

  • Well, she hunted about everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack

  • lying a'most stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid--or young woman rather--

  • standing at the door crying her eyes out.

  • I shall never forget it, never! 'Twould have melted a marble stone!

  • But she couldn't find him nowhere at all." The dairyman paused, and one or two words

  • of comment came from the listeners.

  • Dairyman Crick's stories often seemed to be ended when they were not really so, and

  • strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of finality; though old

  • friends knew better.

  • The narrator went on-- "Well, how the old woman should have had

  • the wit to guess it I could never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there

  • churn.

  • Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by handpower then),

  • and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop about inside.

  • 'O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!' says he, popping out his head.

  • 'I shall be churned into a pummy!' (He was a cowardly chap in his heart, as

  • such men mostly be).

  • 'Not till ye make amends for ravaging her virgin innocence!' says the old woman.

  • 'Stop the churn you old witch!' screams he.

  • 'You call me old witch, do ye, you deceiver!' says she, 'when ye ought to ha'

  • been calling me mother-law these last five months!'

  • And on went the churn, and Jack's bones rattled round again.

  • Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at last 'a promised to make it right wi'

  • her.

  • 'Yes--I'll be as good as my word!' he said. And so it ended that day."

  • While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a quick movement behind

  • their backs, and they looked round.

  • Tess, pale-faced, had gone to the door. "How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost

  • inaudibly.

  • It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the reminiscences of the

  • dairyman. He went forward and opened the door for

  • her, saying with tender raillery--

  • "Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet name),

  • "the prettiest milker I've got in my dairy; you mustn't get so fagged as this at the

  • first breath of summer weather, or we shall

  • be finely put to for want of 'ee by dog- days, shan't we, Mr Clare?"

  • "I was faint--and--I think I am better out o' doors," she said mechanically; and

  • disappeared outside.

  • Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment changed its

  • squashing for a decided flick-flack. "'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the

  • attention of all was called off from Tess.

  • That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she remained much depressed

  • all the afternoon.

  • When the evening milking was done she did not care to be with the rest of them, and

  • went out of doors, wandering along she knew not whither.

  • She was wretched--O so wretched--at the perception that to her companions the

  • dairyman's story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but

  • herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to

  • a certainty, not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.

  • The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky.

  • Only a solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the river,

  • in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend whose friendship she

  • had outworn.

  • In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the household, went to bed

  • at sunset or sooner, the morning work before milking being so early and heavy at

  • a time of full pails.

  • Tess usually accompanied her fellows upstairs.

  • To-night, however, she was the first to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed

  • when the other girls came in.

  • She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished sun, which flushed their

  • forms with its colour; she dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and

  • quietly turned her eyes towards them.

  • Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed.

  • They were standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window, the

  • last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and the walls around

  • them.

  • All were watching somebody in the garden with deep interest, their three faces close

  • together: a jovial and round one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose

  • tresses were auburn.

  • "Don't push! You can see as well as I," said Retty, the

  • auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window.

  • "'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty Priddle," said

  • jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. "His thoughts be of other cheeks than

  • thine!"

  • Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

  • "There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair and keenly

  • cut lips.

  • "You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty.

  • "For I zid you kissing his shade." "WHAT did you see her doing?" asked Marian.

  • "Why--he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the shade of his face

  • came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was standing there filling a vat.

  • She put her mouth against the wall and kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her,

  • though he didn't." "O Izz Huett!" said Marian.

  • A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.

  • "Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with attempted coolness.

  • "And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty, too; and so be you, Marian, come to that."

  • Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

  • "I!" she said.

  • "What a tale! Ah, there he is again!

  • Dear eyes--dear face--dear Mr Clare!" "There--you've owned it!"

  • "So have you--so have we all," said Marian, with the dry frankness of complete

  • indifference to opinion.

  • "It is silly to pretend otherwise amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to

  • other folks. I would just marry 'n to-morrow!"

  • "So would I--and more," murmured Izz Huett.

  • "And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.

  • The listener grew warm. "We can't all marry him," said Izz.

  • "We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the eldest.

  • "There he is again!" They all three blew him a silent kiss.

  • "Why?" asked Retty quickly.

  • "Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian, lowering her voice.

  • "I have watched him every day, and have found it out."

  • There was a reflective silence.

  • "But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length breathed Retty.

  • "Well--I sometimes think that too." "But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett

  • impatiently.

  • "Of course he won't marry any one of us, or Tess either--a gentleman's son, who's going

  • to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us to come wi'en as

  • farm-hands at so much a year!"

  • One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure sighed biggest of

  • all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too.

  • Tears came into the eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest--the last

  • bud of the Paridelles, so important in the county annals.

  • They watched silently a little longer, their three faces still close together as

  • before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling.

  • But the unconscious Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more; and, the

  • shades beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds.

  • In a few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own room.

  • Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for a long time.

  • Retty Priddle cried herself to sleep.

  • The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then.

  • This conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to swallow that

  • day.

  • Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her breast.

  • For that matter she knew herself to have the preference.

  • Being more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except Retty, more

  • woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest ordinary care was necessary

  • for holding her own in Angel Clare's heart against these her candid friends.

  • But the grave question was, ought she to do this?

  • There was, to be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for either of them, in a serious

  • sense; but there was, or had been, a chance of one or the other inspiring him with a

  • passing fancy for her, and enjoying the

  • pleasure of his attentions while he stayed here.

  • Such unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs Crick

  • that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be the use of his

  • marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten

  • thousand acres of Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap.

  • A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him.

  • But whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could never

  • conscientiously allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously determined

  • that she never would be tempted to do so,

  • draw off Mr Clare's attention from other women, for the brief happiness of sunning

  • herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?

  • >

  • CHAPTER XXII

  • They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking were proceeded

  • with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.

  • Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house.

  • He had received a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter had

  • a twang.

  • "And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in his left hand a wooden slice on

  • which a lump of butter was stuck. "Yes--taste for yourself!"

  • Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted, also the other

  • indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and last of all Mrs Crick, who

  • came out from the waiting breakfast-table.

  • There certainly was a twang.

  • The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize the taste,

  • and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to which it appertained,

  • suddenly exclaimed--

  • "'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead!"

  • Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a few of the

  • cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the butter in the

  • same way.

  • The dairyman had not recognized the taste at that time, and thought the butter

  • bewitched. "We must overhaul that mead," he resumed;

  • "this mustn't continny!"

  • All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out together.

  • As the inimical plant could only be present in very microscopic dimensions to have

  • escaped ordinary observation, to find it seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the

  • stretch of rich grass before them.

  • However, they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing to the importance of

  • the search; the dairyman at the upper end with Mr Clare, who had volunteered to help;

  • then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty;

  • then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and the married dairywomen--Beck Knibbs, with her wooly

  • black hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from the winter damps

  • of the water-meads--who lived in their respective cottages.

  • With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of the field,

  • returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they should have

  • finished, not a single inch of the pasture

  • but would have fallen under the eye of some one of them.

  • It was a most tedious business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being

  • discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb's pungency that probably one

  • bite of it by one cow had been sufficient

  • to season the whole dairy's produce for the day.

  • Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did, they yet

  • formed, bending, a curiously uniform row-- automatic, noiseless; and an alien observer

  • passing down the neighbouring lane might

  • well have been excused for massing them as "Hodge".

  • As they crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was

  • reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish,

  • moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring

  • upon their backs in all the strength of noon.

  • Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with the rest in

  • everything, glanced up now and then.

  • It was not, of course, by accident that he walked next to Tess.

  • "Well, how are you?" he murmured. "Very well, thank you, sir," she replied

  • demurely.

  • As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only half-an-hour before,

  • the introductory style seemed a little superfluous.

  • But they got no further in speech just then.

  • They crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his

  • elbow sometimes brushing hers.

  • At last the dairyman, who came next, could stand it no longer.

  • "Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back open and shut!" he

  • exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an excruciated look till quite

  • upright.

  • "And you, maidy Tess, you wasn't well a day or two ago--this will make your head ache

  • finely! Don't do any more, if you feel fainty;

  • leave the rest to finish it."

  • Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind.

  • Mr Clare also stepped out of line, and began privateering about for the weed.

  • When she found him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night

  • before made her the first to speak. "Don't they look pretty?" she said.

  • "Who?"

  • "Izzy Huett and Retty." Tess had moodily decided that either of

  • these maidens would make a good farmer's wife, and that she ought to recommend them,

  • and obscure her own wretched charms.

  • "Pretty? Well, yes--they are pretty girls--fresh

  • looking. I have often thought so."

  • "Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"

  • "O no, unfortunately." "They are excellent dairywomen."

  • "Yes: though not better than you."

  • "They skim better than I." "Do they?"

  • Clare remained observing them--not without their observing him.

  • "She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.

  • "Who?" "Retty Priddle."

  • "Oh!

  • Why it that?" "Because you are looking at her."

  • Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further and cry, "Marry

  • one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and not a lady; and don't think

  • of marrying me!"

  • She followed Dairyman Crick, and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare

  • remained behind.

  • From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him--never allowing herself,

  • as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if their juxtaposition were purely

  • accidental.

  • She gave the other three every chance.

  • Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that Angel Clare had the

  • honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and her perception of his care to

  • avoid compromising the happiness of either

  • in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she deemed, rightly or

  • wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by him, a quality which she had never

  • expected to find in one of the opposite

  • sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple hearts who were his

  • house-mates might have gone weeping on her pilgrimage.

  • >

  • CHAPTER XXIII

  • The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the atmosphere of the flat

  • vale hung heavy as an opiate over the dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees.

  • Hot steaming rains fell frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank,

  • and hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

  • It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers had gone home.

  • Tess and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly, the whole bevy having

  • agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which lay some three or four miles distant

  • from the dairy-house.

  • She had now been two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.

  • All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed down upon the

  • meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but this morning the sun shone out

  • all the more brilliantly for the deluge, and the air was balmy and clear.

  • The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along the lowest

  • levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls reached the most depressed spot

  • they found that the result of the rain had

  • been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards.

  • This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they would have clicked

  • through it in their high patterns and boots quite unconcerned; but on this day of

  • vanity, this Sun's-day, when flesh went

  • forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting business with

  • spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their white stockings and thin

  • shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac

  • gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward

  • impediment. They could hear the church-bell calling--as

  • yet nearly a mile off.

  • "Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!" said Marian, from

  • the top of the roadside bank on which they had climbed, and were maintaining a

  • precarious footing in the hope of creeping

  • along its slope till they were past the pool.

  • "We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else going round the

  • Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!" said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

  • "And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the people staring

  • round," said Marian, "that I hardly cool down again till we get into the That-it-

  • may-please-Thees."

  • While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the bend of the

  • road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along the lane towards them

  • through the water.

  • Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

  • His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic parson's son often

  • presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf

  • inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him off.

  • "He's not going to church," said Marian. "No--I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

  • Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive

  • controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches and chapels

  • on fine summer days.

  • This morning, moreover, he had gone out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood

  • was considerable or not.

  • On his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though they had been so

  • occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to notice him.

  • He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it would quite check their

  • progress.

  • So he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them--one of them in

  • particular.

  • The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light summer

  • attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he stopped a

  • moment to regard them before coming close.

  • Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies

  • which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary.

  • Angel's eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of

  • suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly.

  • He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long boots; and stood

  • looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

  • "Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who was in front, including the

  • next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess. "Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my

  • colour do come up so--"

  • "I'll carry you through the pool--every Jill of you."

  • The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

  • "I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

  • "It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still.

  • Nonsense--you are not too heavy! I'd carry you all four together.

  • Now, Marian, attend," he continued, "and put your arms round my shoulders, so.

  • Now! Hold on.

  • That's well done."

  • Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and Angel strode off

  • with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind, looking like the mere stem to the

  • great nosegay suggested by hers.

  • They disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing footsteps and

  • the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were.

  • In a few minutes he reappeared.

  • Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.

  • "Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were dry with

  • emotion.

  • "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look into his face as Marian did."

  • "There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

  • "There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding.

  • "A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now going to

  • be mine."

  • "Fie--it is Scripture, Izz!" "Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at

  • church for pretty verses."

  • Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a commonplace act of

  • kindness, now approached Izz.

  • She quietly and dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically

  • marched off with her.

  • When he was heard returning for the third time Retty's throbbing heart could be

  • almost seen to shake her.

  • He went up to the red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at

  • Tess. His lips could not have pronounced more

  • plainly, "It will soon be you and I."

  • Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not help it.

  • There was an understanding between them.

  • Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most troublesome

  • of Clare's burdens.

  • Marian had been like a sack of meal, a dead weight of plumpness under which he has

  • literally staggered. Izz had ridden sensibly and calmly.

  • Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

  • However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her, and returned.

  • Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a group, standing as he had placed

  • them on the next rising ground.

  • It was now her turn.

  • She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at the proximity of Mr Clare's

  • breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her companions, was intensified in herself;

  • and as if fearful of betraying her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

  • "I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps--I can clim' better than they.

  • You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

  • "No, no, Tess," said he quickly. And almost before she was aware, she was

  • seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

  • "Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

  • "They are better women than I," she replied, magnanimously sticking to her

  • resolve.

  • "Not to me," said Angel. He saw her grow warm at this; and they went

  • some steps in silence. "I hope I am not too heavy?" she said

  • timidly.

  • "O no. You should lift Marian!

  • Such a lump. You are like an undulating billow warmed by

  • the sun.

  • And all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth."

  • "It is very pretty--if I seem like that to you."

  • "Do you know that I have undergone three- quarters of this labour entirely for the

  • sake of the fourth quarter?" "No."

  • "I did not expect such an event to-day."

  • "Nor I... The water came up so sudden."

  • That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to, the state of

  • breathing belied.

  • Clare stood still and inclinced his face towards hers.

  • "O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

  • The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his eyes for her

  • emotion.

  • It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly taking advantage of an accidental

  • position; and he went no further with it.

  • No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and suspension at this point

  • was desirable now.

  • However, he walked slowly, to make the remainder of the distance as long as

  • possible; but at last they came to the bend, and the rest of their progress was in

  • full view of the other three.

  • The dry land was reached, and he set her down.

  • Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him, and she

  • could see that they had been talking of her.

  • He hastily bade them farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

  • The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence by saying--

  • "No--in all truth; we have no chance against her!"

  • She looked joylessly at Tess. "What do you mean?" asked the latter.

  • "He likes 'ee best--the very best!

  • We could see it as he brought 'ee. He would have kissed 'ee, if you had

  • encouraged him to do it, ever so little." "No, no," said she.

  • The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and yet there was no

  • enmity or malice between them.

  • They were generous young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks

  • where fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her.

  • Such supplanting was to be.

  • Tess's heart ached.

  • There was no concealing from herself the fact that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps

  • all the more passionately from knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to

  • him.

  • There is contagion in this sentiment, especially among women.

  • And yet that same hungry nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the

  • natural result had followed.

  • "I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!" she declared to

  • Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running down).

  • "I can't help this, my dear!

  • I don't think marrying is in his mind at all; but if he were ever to ask me I should

  • refuse him, as I should refuse any man." "Oh! would you?

  • Why?" said wondering Retty.

  • "It cannot be! But I will be plain.

  • Putting myself quite on one side, I don't think he will choose either of you."

  • "I have never expected it--thought of it!" moaned Retty.

  • "But O! I wish I was dead!"

  • The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned to the other two

  • girls who came upstairs just then. "We be friends with her again," she said to

  • them.

  • "She thinks no more of his choosing her than we do."

  • So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

  • "I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose mood was turned to its lowest

  • bass.

  • "I was going to marry a dairyman at Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but--my

  • soul--I would put an end to myself rather'n be his wife now!

  • Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

  • "To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day that he was going to kiss me as

  • he held me; and I lay still against his breast, hoping and hoping, and never moved

  • at all.

  • But he did not. I don't like biding here at Talbothays any

  • longer! I shall go hwome."

  • The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the

  • girls.

  • They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them

  • by cruel Nature's law--an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired.

  • The incident of the day had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their

  • hearts out, and the torture was almost more than they could endure.

  • The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this

  • passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex.

  • There was so much frankness and so little jealousy because there was no hope.

  • Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude herself with any

  • vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the

  • others.

  • The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a social point of

  • view; its purposeless beginning; its self- bounded outlook; its lack of everything to

  • justify its existence in the eye of

  • civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did

  • exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy-- all this imparted to them a resignation, a

  • dignity, which a practical and sordid

  • expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

  • They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring dripped

  • monotonously downstairs.

  • "B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half- an-hour later.

  • It was Izz Huett's voice.

  • Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian suddenly flung the

  • bedclothes off them, and sighed-- "So be we!"

  • "I wonder what she is like--the lady they say his family have looked out for him!"

  • "I wonder," said Izz. "Some lady looked out for him?" gasped

  • Tess, starting.

  • "I have never heard o' that!"

  • "O yes--'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his family; a Doctor of

  • Divinity's daughter near his father's parish of Emminster; he don't much care for

  • her, they say.

  • But he is sure to marry her." They had heard so very little of this; yet

  • it was enough to build up wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the

  • night.

  • They pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the wedding

  • preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and veil, of her blissful home

  • with him, when oblivion would have fallen

  • upon themselves as far as he and their love were concerned.

  • Thus they talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow away.

  • After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that there lurked

  • any grave and deliberate import in Clare's attentions to her.

  • It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own temporary sake--nothing

  • more.

  • And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a

  • cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature,

  • cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in

  • the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

  • >

CHAPTER XV

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